BAREFOOT ON THE WIND

“I know, Sister.” I patted the vast trunk of an ancient cedar with one sun-browned hand as I passed. “I know.”

The tree shuddered a little. I turned away to crouch by the body of the serow I had just brought down. Its thrashing and struggling had already stopped. My fingers sank into the soft, greyish fur as I turned it over and looked down into the animal’s swiftly clouding eyes. I did not fool myself that its death had been painless – how could death ever be without agony? – but my arrow was embedded deeply in the mountain antelope’s heart. It had only suffered for a moment in its passing. That was the best I could do.

The serow’s meat, hung and cured, would feed us for many days. Its pelt would make a warm blanket and perhaps mittens for the coming winter. The horns and bones would become a multitude of useful tools. I had seen little game today, and I was already perilously close to the ever-shifting edge of the Dark Wood that encircled the village; the small preserve of friendly trees that made up our hunting grounds were anxious, shivering and creaking around me, warning me from wandering deeper.

The animal’s death had been necessary, vitally necessary, to our survival. “Thank you,” I said quietly.'

Barefoot on the Wind follows in the footsteps of Shadows on the Moon - in fact, it is the official companion novel, and shares the same setting, the Japanese-inspired fairytale land of Tsuki no Hikari no Kuni (the Moonlit Lands). This book, though, is a Feminist retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Once again, I'm tackling what I think the fairytale is trying to say, while addressing all the problematic bits which I personally think occlude that message. I've had this story living in my head for years and years now, right the way back to 2011.

Just as Cinderella is supposed to be a story about virtue triumphing over wickedness, but in most common versions is really is a tale about passive 'beauty' winning out over 'ugly' activity and ambition, Beauty and the Beast is nominally about learning to love people despite their outer appearances - but really, most versions show it as a story of a prince signally failing to learn his lesson and coercing/bullying/emotionally blackmailing a female prisoner into agreeing to marry him not because he loves her, but because he wants to break the curse without actually having fulfilled it's terms.

Beauty & the Beast is one of my favourite fairytales, and Robin McKinley's Beauty is one of my favourite fairytale retellings ever. But I've never seen anyone tackle my issues with the story in a way that satisfies me. Mostly the bits where the Beast acts like an irrational monster are just glossed over with an 'Oh, he's suffered so much, he can't help it!' attitude, and then the authors will put a lot of effort in showing that no, really, he's a great guy, and never deserved to be cursed in the first place - so it's OK if he acts like a monster now in order to break the curse, right? Right?

Nope.

My major issues:

The beast lures an old man into his cursed palace, and tricks him into committing a minor indiscretion so that he can then threaten his life and demand the right to hold the man's daughter prisoner.

Following this successful acquisition of a Generic Female, and in his position of immense power over her (he's huge and strong, she's small and weak, he controls her environment down to where she goes, what she eats, what she wears) he asks her to marry him *every night* without even giving her a chance to get to know him, although he can tell that she's terrified.

At the end of the story, he magnanimously agrees to let her return to her family for seven days - but tells her that if she doesn't return to him, he'll die. He then ensures that this is the truth by immediately setting out to starve himself. Beauty overstays, but that doesn't actually matter because even if she'd come back on time, she would have found a famished Beast passed out on the floor anyway. And the moment that the Beast revives and finds poor Beauty crying and distraught, he piles on the emotional blackmail and asks her again to marry him, AGAIN, even knowing that she's never wanted to before, because he realises she'll feel too guilty to say no.

D*ck move, Beast. D*ck move.

And the fact that he turns into a handsome prince at the end of the story doesn't fix any of this. He wasn't acting this way because he was a beast. In fact, it was this kind of callous behaviour that got him cursed in the first place!

These sorts of dark, knotty issues always get my creative juices going. I try to figure out situations or character motivations which could make these morally questionable actions read as understandable. Or how to allow those events to take place while ensuring that the narrative doesn't validate them. Or how to flip them on their heads so that something equal yet opposite occurs in their place. One of the key things is usually to put power back into the female character's hands. In traditional versions of B&tB, Beauty supposedly has power because she is permitted to refuse the Beast's advances. But what does this really mean? In practice, very little. She may say 'No' to the Beast's proposals - but no matter what she says, he keeps her locked up and afraid, keeps control of her, and keeps forcing her to answer his question 'Will you marry me?' day after day after day.

So for me to feel happy with Beauty and the Beast, feel that it's truly a story of learning to love despite appearances, I needed to find a way to show that the Beast has learned his lesson - that he has become a person worthy of love regardless of how he looks - and that he wants to be with Beauty not because it will break his curse, but because he loves her. And Beauty must not only have agency within the story, but her decision to say 'yes' to the beast needs to be motivated by love rather than guilt and emotional blackmail.

My version of the story takes place in the dark, haunted forests of Mount Moonview, which we glimpse but do not visit in Shadows on the Moon. The story is of a young girl - a strong and resourceful village girl, rather than a fragile aristocrat - taking up her hunter's weapons and stalking the deep woods in order to find and kill the beast that attacked her father. But the forest is full of more secrets, more magic, and more darkness than she could ever have known. And the beast is not at all what she expects...